It wasn’t an ordinary bullet.

The Wallcreeper screamed. And croaked. And before the croak faded away, in front of the onlookers’ eyes, he turned into a black bird. The bird flapped its wings ponderously, rose up and flew away, shedding drops of blood, above the Odra, towards Ostrów Tumski. It didn’t fly far. Everybody saw the bird, as over the river it turned, with a macabre keening and croaking, into a large, shapeless winged creature, spurting blood, kicking its legs and flapping its wings. The metamorphosis took place before the eyes of everyone present, as the monster fell, now in human form, into the grey waters of the Odra. A dying man with a golden chain on his chest.

The waters closed over the corpse. All that remained was a patch of bloody foam which the current tossed around.

The Wallcreeper’s body came to rest on the starling of the Long Bridge, caught by the branches piled up on it. It floated on the water, face down, rocked by the current, for a good hour. It finally drifted on, the water carrying it beside watermills, towards sandbars, where several times it was grounded on shallows. Then a stronger current took it, sending it again towards the left bank, towards Garbary, into the stinking waste from the tanning workshops. Turning around in whirlpools, it flowed to Sokolnicki’s weir where the water carried it over the crest.

In the deeper water beyond the island, the corpse, spinning around in whirlpools, attracted the attention of a monstrous Odra catfish. But the body was still too fresh to nip flesh from it, and the big fish jerking the body only managed to turn it over onto its back. So when the Wallcreeper flowed into the broad water near Szczepin, some terns landed on it. By the time it reached Bytyń it had no eyes, just two bloody holes in its face.

In Popowice, the shepherd boys watering their cows pointed it out to each other.

It was late afternoon when it reached Kleczków. And came to rest by a groyne reinforced with a fascine.

An angler in a straw hat was sitting on the groyne, holding a hazel rod. For a while, he looked at the body turning around in the eddy. At its black hair, billowing in the water like the tentacles of sea anemones. At the birdlike face and nose.

“At last!” cried the angler, leaping to his feet. “At last! Glory to the philosophers! You’ve come, Birkart of Grellenort!” shouted Wendel Domarasc, cavorting like a madman and waving his arms around. “I’ve waited a long time, patiently, yes, I’ve waited patiently by the river! And the Odra has finally brought you! And I can look at you! Oh, how glad I am to be able to look at you!”

The body bumped against the groyne, turned around and joined the current. The former Hussite spy waved goodbye to it.